How one artist smuggled Iraqi war victim names into Congress

When we hold our annual two-day WIRED festival, WIRED2015, on October 15-16 in London, some of the strongest talks will be from the WIRED Innovation Fellows -- 15 emerging stars we've brought together in fields ranging from rocket engineering to digital art.

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Matt Kenyon (USA) -- new media artist

Kenyon uses his art to challenge The Man -- the military-industrial complex, or the corporation, in all sorts of fun mischievous ways. He uses sculpture, software and living organisms "to explore the effects of global corporations, military-industrial complexes and the line between human and artificial life".

At TED, he presented his Notepad project, a way of physically smuggling the names of every Iraqi civilian killed since the US invasion into US Congress. How? By designing the names in teeny-tiny letters into the lines of specially created ruled notepaper -- and then sending them to Congressmen. "Notepad is an act of protest and commemoration disguised as a stack of ordinary yellow legal pads," he says. "Each ruled line, when magnified, is revealed to be microprinted text enumerating the full names, dates, and locations of each Iraqi civilian death on record over the first three years of the Iraq War. The designers imagine each printed edition of 100 notepads, meant to be covertly distributed to US representatives and Senators, as a sort of Trojan horse, injecting transgressive data straight into the halls of power." "I used a printing technique normally used for currency," he says. "I printed 300lb of paper and gave pages to all of TED during my talk -- and asked people to write to a member of [the US] government and help smuggle it in to be part of the archive. I want the subtext of the war to become a Trojan horse -- slipping the names of civilians into the archive. My goal is to smuggle the paper into the Library of Congress and equivalent libraries of coalition of the willing governments, so histories are written not just from the side of the winners. Around 150,000 to a million Iraqi civilians died as a result of the invasion. I want the individual names to make it into history."

Kenyon, based in Detroit, is an associate professor in the Stamps School of Art and Designat the University of Michigan. His other projects have included creating Coca-Cola-consuming robots (when Coke hits the circuitry, the robots die); and a helmet-based exercise machine designed to turn chewing McDonald's burgers into a fitness training session.